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Does Lower Grade Point Average Equate to Poor Health? Essay

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In this study piloted by Trockel, Barnes and Egget (2000) they hypothesized that poor health behaviors would be greater amongst those with low grade point averages. The predictors of the correlation study were: exercise, eating, sleep habits, mood states, perceived stress, time management, social support, spiritual habits, number of hours worked per week, gender and age. The outcome variable was the students’ grade point averages. The goal of the study was to see which health behavior affected grade point averages the most. The participants were 200 freshmen. The university’s Office of Institutional Studies gave the names, on-campus addresses and phone numbers of 200 randomly selected freshmen. The authors used the health behavior …show more content…

Questions asking about the number of hours they work per week were also collected and the students’ gender and age were collected from the university. The students were mailed the survey, a cover letter a consent form. They were given 9 days to do the survey. The students that did not complete the survey were contacted and they did the survey on the telephone. 143 completed the mail survey and 43 completed the telephone survey. The total usable rate was 92%. The authors used the spearman's rank order correlation to analyze how each item related to academic performance and the stepwise regression analysis to identify which predictor was the main effect on academic performance. The variables later weekday and weekend wake up times, later weekday and weekend bed times, number of hours of sleep on weekend nights and number of hours worked per week were responsible for low GPAs. No other variable affected academic performance. The relationship between sleep habits and grade point averages was the strongest and so it supports the hypothesis for this study (Trockel, Barnes & Egget, 2000). This hypothesis is relevant to my own topic area because I will be studying if practicing a healthy lifestyle affects students’ performance. The conceptual variables for this study were almost identical to my variables. For my study, my predictors are going to be exercise, eating habits, moods throughout the day and sleeping habits. I will

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